A Call to the Learning Road

A Call to the Learning Road

    Wisdom comes in all guises, in youthful exuberance as much as cloaked in venerated gown and mortarboard.  More so, it can be common and ready wisdom – a casual conversation, an overheard aphorism – that indicates a journey we ought to take.  I suspect we have all been recipients of wisdom that, heeded or not, we later recognized as a critical juncture in our travels, a fork in our road of learning.  Therefore, lifelong learning is first a call to our road and foremost an embarking upon our journey.
    My first memorable glimpse into informal lifelong learning came during my days as an apprentice Blues saxophonist, during a long drive from Edmonton to Saskatoon in a van filled with veteran Blues musicians.  Rogues to the outsider, the unschooled music makers of the world, chroniclers and exemplars, carry with them the breadth and depth of human experience.  Our traveling Blues elder assured me that the one book I should take on my impending contract as a cruise ship musician ought to be Joseph Campbell’s Myths to Live By.  Joseph Campbell may have provided the script for further learning but the Blues elder, the roots music bodhisattva, illuminated the fork in the road.
    An identifiable advantage to formal lifelong learning is visible, celebrated mileposts: you don your robe and mortarboard, sitting before the public until your turn comes to cross the threshold into knowing.  It may even be unclear what enduring understanding you have acquired but you most certainly have acquired enough of something such that society applauds you.  After twenty years as an educator in Community Colleges and International Schools I too will soon be celebrated for having reached a formal milepost: two semesters in Initial Teacher Education.  In her novel Prozac Nation Elizabeth Wurtzel quotes The Sun Also Rises to illuminate how she became depressed.  A character in Hemingway’s novel is asked how he became bankrupt, to which he eventually replies “Gradually and then suddenly.”  This is how we come to know that we have much more to learn.
    An enduring understanding from Initial Teacher Education came during the final days of my first teaching practicum.  Confident in my subject area, I focused my attention on an anti-oppression lesson planning assignment.  I had learned that student diversity was woefully underrepresented in classroom resources and I set out to illuminate this for those very same students.  The lesson would be the culminating moment of my journey to becoming an ally.  It came suddenly as prophesied: the students’ reflections on the lesson revealed that they were well aware of their underrepresentation.  I had underestimated their depth of prior knowledge. 
    Initial Teacher Education will shape the next twenty years of my career but seventeen year-olds illuminated the fork in the road.  I once measured the wisdom of others in terms of initials appended to a name or pages attributed to it.  Since, I have realized that we are much more than a collection of artifacts or titles: Life’s enduring meaning comes from the pursuit of understanding rather than from its possession or dissemination.